Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 36: The Return, Part 2

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2 hours ago, Gattman said:

I was reminded of the Harry Dean Stanton watching Hyena's on the TV in Mulholland Dr. scene actually I get a sense of deja vu with a few of the things happening in this series

 

Do you mean Wild at Heart? I actually saw both movies recently, but my memory is a bit foggy. I didn't even remember a possible connection until you mentioned this.

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Just now, Bolegium said:

 

Do you mean Wild at Heart? I actually saw both movies recently, but my memory is a bit foggy. I didn't even remember a possible connection until you mentioned this.

Sorry yes I stand corrected there

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On 5/22/2017 at 6:23 PM, Mington said:

Disappearing black man in the jail cell

 

I thought that was Jürgen Prochnow, from that scene from FWWM with BOB and the others in the room above the convenience store ... showing BOB's touch in the situation.

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On 23.5.2017 at 11:48 PM, ihavefivehat said:

I love that you mention Amanita Design, Nappi. There's a part in Episode 3 (you'll know it when you see it) that distinctly reminded me of Samorost.

 

Haha.. Just watched the episode. You are totally right.

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I'm not sure if this was in Part 1 or 2, but I love how Hawk completely trusts the Log Lady and immediately began digging up old files to find what was missing in Cooper's case. Reminds me of how they all totally bought in to Cooper's Tibetan rock tossing back in the day.

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Twin Peaks distortion.jpg

 

I'm interested in how the image distorts when Phyllis Hastings is shot. The middle bows to the right, and it looks like several frames are merged. I was reminded of it by the distortion when Laura Palmer gets levitated away later in the episode, but it's hard to say whether it's a deliberate association (like the same force is acting in both cases), or if it's just an effect. Perhaps it's not meant to mean anything in the case of the shooting, and is just intended to intensify the moment. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that something more supernatural is going on, given Doppelgänger Cooper's nature. It's too early to say, of course.

 

 

It also cuts back to that frame a few frames later, which reminds me of the staccato back-and-forth someone's-playing-with-the-jog-dial effect from the blind lady's room in episode 3, but that feels like even more of a reach; I'm almost certain it's just that Lynch is into playing around with time in his experimental video treatment stuff.

 

Hooray for over-analysis!

 

Oh, and I guess it doesn't need mentioning that she ends up with the mirror image of the wound that her husband is accused of inflicting on Ruth Davenport. A literal eye for a literal eye?

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btw: The new episode of Twin Peaks Rewatch is out, covering this episode!

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On 5/23/2017 at 4:02 PM, Nappi said:

- I wish the song at the end had felt either more or much less fitting for the scene. I think I would enjoy the song on its own quite a bit, but in the context it felt like a slightly overproduced tribute to Twin Peaks bar music (which I guess it kinda is). This wasn't helped by the fact that the song is very synth heavy, but no one was playing one. Unfortunately, this didn't create that jarring sensation Lynch is so good at conjuring up. To me it felt like a fan video made by combining a song and a sort of fitting scene in a TV series.

 

My experience: I watched the first two episodes as an uninterrupted super cut. After an hour and forty-five minutes of unrelenting tension and constant near sub-sonic noise, the music at the end was a totally divine release. Since the roadhouse is full of millennials it totally make sense to me that more sound was being made by a pre-recorded track than the musicians on stage, which is pretty normal in 2017 ^_^ The band they had during the original run was also totally fake too, for example, Chris brought it up in an old episode that the singer has way too much reverb for it to sound anything like a live performance. Because so much we've seen before the end is obviously fake (digital effects, hacking the FBI, the decapitated corpse etc.) the ending needs that flavor too or it wouldn't give me that release, I think. Just like a modern concert, I buy into the experience of Twin Peaks, even if I know the artists are "cheating" at times. Indeed, the obviously fake aspect of Lynch's work is why I watch it. Anyway, I experienced these first two episodes as a Lynch film, so the music at the end was totally predictable and yet no less absolutely perfect for me, because it was a return to Blue Velvet:

 

 

Minor spoilers for Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Inland Empire :

 

The obviously fake bird is the icing on the cake for that movie's "everything's just hunky dory now lol" ending. After all that I'm just supposed to believe we're all ok? However, you could still describe the ending to Blue Velvet to someone and have it make sense; same with Fire Walk With Me. After that, things change: Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway both reveal the ouroboros, go for a bit longer, and then end with "wasn't that a fun fucked-up ride?"; Inland Empire doubles down and goes so far as to be wacky and fun. Ultimately, all of these films conclude with dreams or dream-like sequences. 

 

Digital effects: love 'em. Way scarier and more evocative than million dollar Hollywood "realism". The first couple of times I watched a David Lynch movie they were jarring, but after that I came to expect and relish them. The only effect I didn't like, if I'm being totally honest, were the paintings of the human remains in South Dakota. The camera even zooms in on the first painting which only makes it look worse. Unlike the other effects, these remains aren't a ghost, a spirit, an aspect of a dream, etc., these are supposed to be actual human parts we're seeing here. I wish they had made something physical, but I know those can really suck too: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxN3-E5gv7I) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cAyezzVHv4) (yes, that pathetic dummy in this big budget action film is supposed to be Dave Chappelle's character's actual corpse) (yes, in the 90s the actor who played Briggs was in literally everything)

 

Sarah Palmer: despite self-medicating so heavily she really perks up when the TV shows... a lion biting its prey while also making out with it?! The two animals are locked in a kiss, basically... with one of them being force-ably held down and bleeding from the mouth. Consider me creeped-out to the max.

 

Doubling down on James: wait, they doubled down on James when they kept him after the pilot. Tripling down on James: ...I guess that happened when they recorded that insufferable song. Ok, quadrupling down on James: no... that happened when he finally left on his motorcycle and got mixed up with whatever the hell happened with that plotline. Quintupling down on James: n o p l e a s e m a k e i t s t o p

 

Hacking: along with a tape recorder that apparently wirelessly picks up and records landline conversations, and the black box that he uses to talk to (not) Jeffries, I think the laptop is also somehow magical. What you guys didn't mention on the podcast is that Bad Coop's laptop snows-up, flickers, warps, and distorts like it's a CRT display. I think Lynch and the rest of the production team know what a computer looks like and how it behaves, and I believe the phonyness is intentional and hints at it being supernatural, even if the people who make TV shows have a habit of making ridiculously fake computers for fun :lol: In any case, I don't need, and in fact would hate to get, any technical explanations for how any of his gadgets work.

 

By the way, I was wondering if anyone could answer this for me: when law enforcement run prints through a database, does their computer screen really flash a bunch of faces? In this case I think the production team just did a stupid trope that all cop procedurals do. I wonder if small town police sheriffs reject software when it doesn't act like it does on TV, and in response developers have implemented the pointless feature of scrolling through twenty faces a second. Hold on... Bad Coop's laptop also scrolls through a million images as he downloads the information for the prison, another stupid trope... well, at this point I'm just revealed to be a total apologist for Lynch I guess :P. Ok, new explanation: Bad Coop accidentally hit F11 when he was browsing the FBI website on Chrome and he doesn't know how to fix it. Just imagine though, if every time you downloaded something, instead of a progress bar your entire display was taken up by flashing images and .txt fragments. That would be pretty rad imo.

 

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Chris and Jake discussed the difference between Bob occupying Leland and occupying Cooper on the 'cast. While I'd agree that the FWWM was a little more ambiguous regarding Leland's agency when Bob takes over, I think it's difficult to compare without knowing precisely what a doppelgänger is. Leland wasn't one but BadCoop is. Is it just an empty vessel that needs to be occupied by a Red Room entity to exist in the real world? Is it literally a mirror of Cooper with malevolent tendencies? Do doppelgangers routinely reside in the real world? Are all doppelgangers in the Black Lodge bad? Laura seems alright for the most part. Leland didn't kill anybody, and now seems much more Leland-like. The arm states that he himself has a doppelgänger, no? So I assume BadCoop came to the real world with all GoodCoop's knowledge and skills.

 

It'll be fun to see how much they explore BadCoop's history over the past 25 years. The Secret History book gave us a glimpse of Major Briggs' impression of BadCoop.

 

Edited 'Leyland' to 'Leland'😉

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I'm not sure if anyone has pointed this out already but re: The White Horse, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to signify death - I'll try and find a concrete reference to it if I can!

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4 hours ago, Lil the Dancer said:

I'm not sure if anyone has pointed this out already but re: The White Horse, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to signify death - I'll try and find a concrete reference to it if I can!

I always thought that too. Doesn't one appear to Sarah when Maddie dies? 

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Also are we sure that woman with coffee is just the box watchers girlfriend? Seemed suspicious to me, like desperate to get in there, even trying to look at the code and stuff. When is the scene with the guy in Vegas? Could she be the woman who's "got the job"? Like someone, maybe doppeldale is trying to find out whats going on in there. 

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A question I've always had re: David Lynch, but which you guys point to in this episode, is how to regard his most eccentric decisions. 

 

I think Lynch has (rightfully) garnered a reputation for esoteric and eccentric, but usually very well tuned and focused, sensibilities. I often go into a Lynch film with the baseline understanding or heuristic that the decisions he makes are usually the right ones for what he's trying to do, and I'm in the wrong for when I can't understand them. I think there have been some notable exceptions to this, where I have no choice but to conclude that somewhere along the line one of his weird decisions just is not correct, but I think it's usually more useful to assume that he does things for a reason that is worth trying to understand, even if it's only my own perception or interpretation. (By the way, I do recognize this is how you are supposed to approach most art, especially films which take a ton of time and you should always assume are deliberately created, but very few filmmakers I've seen are quite as - well - weird, as he is, and more importantly, are weird in meaningful ways.) 

 

That being said - how do you guys think about, for example, the extremely strange and intentionally 'bad' or at the very least cheesy VFX? I feel like the standard response are references to his involvement with the visual arts, or his differing perceptions on the point of verisimilitude in film, but I've very rarely heard a compelling take on what exactly makes these moments good, or worthwhile. It feels somewhat self-referential and redundaunt to say that his odd decisions are good because he makes good odd decisions, so is there something deeper that I'm just not getting at? Is it purely a weird aesthetic thing in Lynch's own brain that we, as general Lynch fans, are just expected to grin and bear or try to enjoy in some  semi-ironic, "I can't believe he's doing this" way? 

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1 hour ago, Gamebeast23456 said:

A question I've always had re: David Lynch, but which you guys point to in this episode, is how to regard his most eccentric decisions. 

 

[...] 

 

That being said - how do you guys think about, for example, the extremely strange and intentionally 'bad' or at the very least cheesy VFX? I feel like the standard response are references to his involvement with the visual arts, or his differing perceptions on the point of verisimilitude in film, but I've very rarely heard a compelling take on what exactly makes these moments good, or worthwhile. It feels somewhat self-referential and redundaunt to say that his odd decisions are good because he makes good odd decisions, so is there something deeper that I'm just not getting at? Is it purely a weird aesthetic thing in Lynch's own brain that we, as general Lynch fans, are just expected to grin and bear or try to enjoy in some  semi-ironic, "I can't believe he's doing this" way? 

 

 

 

I think David Lynch often just doesn't care if an effect is good as long as it gets the job done and lets his shot be a vehicle for the things that are important to him.

 

I know that sounds flippant or dismissive, but "having a focus you care about while letting other things slip away," is actually common among directors but we are collectively maybe more lenient for some things than others. For example, there are directors who care above all else about the visual effects work in their shots being pristine and seamlessly integrated with what's captured by the camera's lens, to the point that - at times - they don't care if the acting is good, or if their shot is about anything beyond that seamless execution of spectacle. We often give those people a way bigger pass than we give David Lynch. (Or, different audiences will give directors a pass for caring about some elements while neglecting others.)

 

I say this as a person who loves and respects an immaculately performed special or visual effect, and some of the work I'm the most proud of in video games I've worked on are elaborate moments of visual trickery that make people ask "how did they do that," which is to say: I'm not one to poo poo great effects work. I don't think it needs to be an assumed part of every production. A modern "AAA" production in any medium has so many assumed default "must-haves" that you can very easily be locked into aesthetics you don't want if you take them all on board (even putting aside whether your production can achieve them). I don't always like the look of effects in Lynch productions but I respect him and everyone involved for making the decisions to a) take risks aesthetically, and b ) know how to prioritize what is important to them.

 

Sort of separately from the above: Television and film are ultimately a 2D medium. Even though we spend a lot of time watching films and television shows which aim to fool our brains into thinking we are looking through a window into another reality, we are ultimately looking at a flat image projected onto a flat plane. Lynch is a rare person who creates entertainment product that has made it to TV networks and big movie theater chains, and is not exclusively interested in a TV movie screen as a window, but instead as a canvas. (That's more common in animation, especially experimental animation, but more rare in things that start off with a photographed image of reality, and obviously super rare in photography-based work that ends up getting super wide distribution).

 

 

I'm also not trying to argue that, if/because the above is true, that means anyone has to like it. I'm not sure I like it all the time.

 

While I don't always like what Lynch makes, I do like that Lynch offers a different way of thinking about many aspects of the moving picture mediums - he sees many things as creative choices that can be altered or subverted or thrown out or wielded as tools - which most of us take for granted without question. 

 

Sorry if that is all obvious! It took me a while to internalize that myself, at least, and be able to express it succinctly. 

 

 

I also also have no idea if I answered your question at all! I would never make the creative decisions David Lynch does (my brain doesn't work that way and isn't interested in doing so), and he is very opaque about his process so it's hard to get a window into his reasoning. Ultimately his work sticks in my imagination, idle thoughts, and dreams in a way that is very rare.

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I think it's worth examining why an effect being believable and seamless is often described as "good". That's true if you're measuring how convincing it is as a fabricated reality but that's not the only measure of what makes a TV show/film look good. I have a hard time actually engaging in suspension of disbelief. Usually when I watch TV or a movie I do so entirely conscious of it as a fabricated fiction and I'm just digesting it as a piece of media.

 

So really, I'm not worried about Lynch's effects seeming real, when they're evocative. When Cooper was in the glass box and it slowly condensed in on him, it was actually very poorly done and jumpy. Cooper in the box didn't smoothly scale down to a smaller size, he jumped around in the box from position to position, and the box itself shifted around a bit too. This made it rougher, but I think that worked because it made the scene all the more unsettling and threatening.

 

I'm not saying to say you can't call these effects bad, but just think about what makes them bad. And whether or not that always matters in the end. If you know Lynch's effects will sometimes be blunt and obvious, what might be good about them too?

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I've honestly not been negatively distracted by any of the VFX thus far. On the other hand, I've really been impressed by the overall aesthetic of the show and the cinematography - specifically the shots inside the "box" room and the imposing still shots of the object itself. If anything, perhaps it's felt so overly-cinematic that my mind is having a hard time bridging the connection to previous TP materials.

 

...cue the inevitable return of "Little Devil Nicky in a superimposed thought bubble."

 

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I've always felt that if a special effect is supposed to convey something that is out of this world and unnatural, going 100% realistic would be the wrong answer. I'd say that having to pick their battles when spreading the budget across multiple vfx shots and then being forced into the position of having to embrace a shitty effect is a bit of a blessing in this case.

Similarly to having awkward vfx, you have lots of awkward dialog and editing choices in his work that also "take you out of the film". I'd actually love to see video games incorporate some of this approach some day.

 

Another movie that has unrealistic cg is Speed Racer and that move is awesome! Even though that is more of a real life cartoon, not a real life shampoo ad with blood and other shameful bodily fluids all over it as it's wrapping a bit of a corpse floating down a small town river, like Twin Peaks is.

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Apologies for commenting before listening to the new podcasts, but the point where I most consistently disagreed with Jake and Chris in the podcasts for the original run was re: how much was intentional and how much was just poorly done. Obviously it'd be impossible to get a definitive answer even from somebody who wasn't as notoriously "the art speaks for itself" as Lynch, but I tend to side with "intentional" almost always.

 

For instance: one thing I'm really happy to see in the new series, and which I always associate with Twin Peaks*, is the way traveling in the woods at night is depicted. It seems to always be headlights or a flashlight against the trees, with a circle of stark, artificial clarity in the center of the frame and a huge completely black expanse everywhere else.

 

Technically speaking, it's poorly lit. And the "standard" technique for movies and series inspired by Twin Peaks seems to go the X-Files route and have enough ambient light to fill the whole frame -- X-Files often had flashlights diffused by fog, or a preternaturally bright light just over the horizon, to make everything seem creepy, but it was still well lit. Shots in the woods in Twin Peaks are just unsettling, though. Especially when they're going to the Black Lodge. It feels like darkness is closing in on everything, and your feeble attempts to fend off the darkness can barely make a dent. To me it does the same thing as that recurring shot of a traffic light in the original series, which is that idea of civilization feebly trying to hold off darkness everywhere.

 

So I tend to think the same for the VFX. Even when it's not intentional to convey an idea, it's still part of a unique look. The artifice draws attention to itself and is part of what makes it uniquely unsettling. I'd agree that there's some element of "good enough for what we're doing," but I don't see it as a limitation in any way -- I can imagine that "more professional" effects would just blend in with everything else and become forgettable.

 

*(It's in Wild at Heart and long stretches of Lost Highway I guess, but it's not used exactly the same way)
 

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Nerd correction to part of the conversation in the 'cast episode.

 

Twin Peaks technically has a population of 50,000, which would mean a high school population of 3,000ish (give or take based on aging population and all that).  Original Twin Peaks I think was intended to be a much smaller town, but it got revised at some point.  Which creates some odd things, where portions of the show feel like a much smaller town, and portions of the show feel like something more appropriate to a town of 50K. 

 

I honestly think Season 3 is trying to correct some of the discrepancies that the change in population caused in the original show.  Like the Roadhouse being packed with a bunch of young people, the way the local concert venue would be in a town that size.  A police department for a town of 50,000 should have dozens of employees, and it never feels like that's the case in the slightest bit in 1 (obviously they wouldn't have that many characters, but it really just feels like there are a handful of employees).  Spoilering this because it relates to the Ep 3:
 

Spoiler

When Truman walks into the back room of the police station, and there's a dispatcher and a bunch of cops, that feels way more appropriate to the size that TP is supposed to be.

 

Another example is that The Great Northern really feels out of place if Twin Peaks is a small town in the boonies of Washington.  It's far more believable that someone would build that place in a town of 50K, because it could actually support some amount of tourism, whereas a town of 5K just can't very well. 

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I'd felt in the original series like Twin Peaks was more booming 30 years ago but as tourism and logging dried up, the town shrank, and it felt believable. They'd have a school that big and a big old hotel and an aging department store, but the town would be shrinking, not growing.

 

That said, I think you're right. I grew up in a town of 50,000 people and what you describe seems accurate. It seems like they have made some peace with it being a 50,000 person town (which is honestly more likely for a pacific northwest town like that in 2017 than 1990 anyway I think?) and adjusting things in kind.

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I grew up in a small town of about 4,000, so there are actually elements that I really identified with in Twin Peaks (like literally everyone knowing the Sheriff by name), but then the things that made it feel like a larger town felt jarring. 

 

I agree that original Twin Peaks was supposed to feel like a fading, shrinking town, they just couldn't quite nail the consistency of feel throughout it.

 

In real life Washington logging town news, I read an article recently about falling tax revenues in small to mid sized towns in Washington, as the taxes from logging have shrank, populations have refused to approve new taxes to fill the gap, which leads to things like police stations not running 24 hours.  Which watching the opening of FWWM reminded me of that when the sheriff in that town mentions that they close the police station at 5 and go home.

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9 hours ago, Woodfella said:

I always thought that too. Doesn't one appear to Sarah when Maddie dies? 

 

The horse appears in the original series when Maddie dies, and also in Fire Walk With Me when Leland/Bob enters Laura's window. I always assumed it was (at least, on one level) an effect of the drugs that Sarah Palmer is given by Leland, because it was always shown from her point of view. I can not explain why it is now in the red room/black lodge.

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